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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25110673">Shenanigans</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deberzer/pseuds/Deberzer'>Deberzer</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Tomb Raider (Video Games)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/F</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 07:41:01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,890</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25110673</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deberzer/pseuds/Deberzer</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of unrelated oneshots.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Lara Croft/Samantha Nishimura</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>15</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Shenanigans</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>For a week, Lara and Sam had hiked through the impenetrable rainforest on the western slopes of the mountains in the southwest of Cambodia. It never stopped raining as they waded through riverbeds and unbearable sticky heat. The word “dry” had been erased from their vocabulary. Any electronic that wasn’t waterproof had given up.</p><p>Far away from any sign of civilization, modern or ancient, they stumbled upon the temple Lara had been looking for. Built into the mountain, half overgrown by the rainforest, half-buried by debris, it was no wonder no one had ever found it. At least not in the past few hundred years.</p><p>One vague sentence in an inscription to be found in well-known ruins in the northern part of Cambodia was all Lara needed to find out about its existence. One of the things Sam loved about her.</p><p>Together, they cut away several plants from the entrance and pried open the heavy stone door with the help of a climbing axe. The air inside was dusty but surprisingly dry. Stepping from the tropical climate into the temple was like climbing out of the ocean. Sam felt the need to try and fix her hair but there was no saving.</p><p>The temple was pitch black inside. There were no openings in the walls where light could enter. Nothing their high-performance flashlights couldn’t deal with.</p><p>They panned the light beams around the entrance hall. The walls were decorated with large, detailed reliefs and inscriptions. Several statues of Hindu gods lined the path to the next door: Most of them were made of stone, a few were damaged, one was made of wood. There was also an old woodcarving. It depicted Shiva, Lara explained when Sam inspected it.</p><p>Sam spun around a few times, taking in everything in. It was love at first sight. While archaeology was mostly Lara’s passion, Sam couldn’t help being completely captivated by the atmosphere. Standing in a historical site no one had seen for hundreds of years, being the first to lay eyes on the beautiful architecture and invaluable, antique decorations sent a shiver down her spine and goosebumps down her arms.</p><p>Carefully, they walked through the hall, inspecting everything from close up while Lara told Sam her observations. She guessed the temple and the stone decorations were about a thousand years old, as old the known ruins on the other side of the mountain. But the wooden additions were a few hundred years newer. Most likely replacements for damaged or lost originals.</p><p>Lara urged Sam to press on. She was obviously eager to see what else they could find. They entered a long corridor where they stumbled upon a trap. It was a covered pit with spears at the bottom. Instead of being deterred from going on by the notion of traps, Lara got a glint in her eyes. Sam could read her mind; traps tended to protect something valuable, she guessed. Nodding, Lara added that it confirmed her suspicion that that place was not a temple but a treasury. Without hesitation, Lara passed the trap pressed against the wall and continued down the corridor, looking out for more traps. There were a few more but they were easy to pick out with their flashlights.</p><p>Through the next doorway, they ended up in a somewhat long hall. An ornate stone pillar in the middle of the room supported the high ceiling from which three chandeliers hung, two left and right of the pillar and the third one between it and the entrance. They were made of a large metal ring that hung on chains from the ceiling. A few unlit braziers and more statues of Hindu gods lined the walls.</p><p>Sam was still looking at everything when a “huh” resounded in the hall. Lara stood near the other end of the hall, unmoving. Sam caught up to her.</p><p>A chasm, cutting through the mountain and the room, separated them from the exit. It must have formed long after the temple had been built. The chasm was about ten metres wide and at least three times as deep. Its ragged, sharp-edged rocky sides were steep and Sam’s flashlight could hardly reach the bottom of the abyss. The fourth chandelier lay damaged at the bottom among rocks.</p><p>They had climbing hooks with ropes to overcome vertical hurdles but nothing to bridge a gap like that. The small area of floor left in front of the exit offered no purchase for the hook to swing across.</p><p>“Huh,” Sam said, mimicking Lara. When she saw Lara reach for her climbing hook, she added a determined, “No.”</p><p>Lara swung the rope, letting the hook spin around her arm.</p><p>“No,” Sam repeated louder.</p><p>“What?” Lara let her arm drop to her side.</p><p>“No way that’s gonna work. What’s the hook supposed to get caught on? Besides, if you swing over there, you’d crash into that ragged rock. Dude, please. I’m not gonna pick up your remains from the bottom of this pit.”</p><p>Sam panned her light over to Lara to look at her. Lara pulled a disgruntled face. Worried she was still considering trying to swing across, Sam was about to continue talking her out of it. What good did the discovery of an unknown temple with invaluable treasures do if they died in it?</p><p>Before she could open her mouth, Lara turned away from the chasm and examined the room again. The beam of her light moved across the walls, the ceiling, and the pillar. Lara made a pleased grunt. She smiled. “Don’t worry, I have a plan.”</p><p>“What plan?” Sam raised her eyebrows.</p><p>Without answering, Lara strode over to the closest brazier at the left wall. “Light my surroundings, please,” she said and dropped her own lamp and rucksack on the floor.</p><p>“What plan?” Sam repeated and pointed her flashlight in Lara’s direction.</p><p>Lara grabbed the shoulder-high rim of the brazier and heaved herself up and into the bowl. A black cloud of dust and ash shot into the air, engulfing her. Lara coughed. The longer the cloud took to dissolve, the heavier her coughing got and eventually became a coughing fit.</p><p>“Are you okay?” Sam said alarmed and hurried over.</p><p>As Lara wheezed into her tank top she’d pulled over her mouth and nose, she signalled Sam with her other hand to stay back. “I’m okay,” she said after the dust had settled and she had caught her breath. “Can you go shine the light again, please?”</p><p>Sam watched Lara a moment longer until she could breathe normally again. Sam then went back into the middle of the room close to the chasm and turned around. She panned the light across the hall, across the statues of different heights, and the slightly leaning pillar before pointing it back in Lara’s direction.</p><p>“Wait,” Sam said, having realized what Lara was about to do. “Can we talk about your so-called plan?”</p><p>“Why?” Lara straightened herself, the leftovers of burnt coals crunching under her soles.</p><p>“Don’t you think maybe, just maybe, everything comes crashing down if you topple the one pillar in the room?” Sam couldn’t suppress the hint of panic in her voice.</p><p>“I doubt it’s a mainstay. The room is narrow enough and inside a mountain.” In Lara’s voice, there was no trace of worry. With one foot on the rim of the brazier, Lara faced a weathered wooden statue of a man with four arms holding items in his hands. There was a distance of maybe three meters between it and Lara. The statue was taller than Lara and stood on a smooth, square stone base about twice as tall. Swinging her arms, Lara prepared for the jump.</p><p>“Also,” Sam added, unable to hush the alarm bells in her head, “don’t you think you could damage those priceless artefacts if you climb around on them?”</p><p>“Sam…” Lara dropped her arms and looked at her. “Can you not criticize everything I do? Didn’t you say it’s important for a healthy relationship to support each other?”</p><p>Sam was speechless. She couldn’t believe Lara had just pulled that card on her. Disgruntled, she pressed her lips into a thin line and went back to being Lara’s spotlight.</p><p>With a smug smirk, Lara built up momentum again. When her weight shifted forward, the brazier broke loose with a loud scrunch and toppled over. With flailing arms, Lara tried to keep her balance as the bowl slid off its pedestal. Somehow, she managed to jump off and crashed into the side of the statue, barely holding onto the man’s foot. The brazier flew into the air from the jump’s force, spilling its burnt content. Another black cloud cloaked the area in darkness. The brazier hit the wall in a shower of sparks that flew through the ash cloud like shooting stars through the night. The brazier bounced off the wall and hit the base of the statue close to Lara’s legs with another explosion of sparks, breaking a chunk of stone out of it. Lara flinched away, cursing. The brazier fell to the floor.</p><p>For a moment, Sam was terrified the sparks could set Lara on fire but then she realized their clothes were drenched with rain, river water and sweat. Once again, Sam traced back the steps she’d rushed forward.</p><p>Lara pulled herself up to the statue and halted. She looked down the side and cursed again. Frantically, she kicked at a light coming from the feet of the wooden form. It flickered red and yellow and grew in intensity.</p><p>“Lara?” It didn’t take long before the smell of burnt wood reached Sam’s nose. “Is that guy burning?”</p><p>“That’s Vishnu,” she said as if it mattered and quickly climbed on top of his head, apparently unable to extinguish the fire. In a matter of seconds, Vishnu’s base stood in flames that crept up towards her.</p><p>“Get off there! You’re hot enough,” Sam shouted.</p><p>“Working on it,” Lara muttered while balancing, hunched, on the shoulders of Vishnu, six meters above the floor.</p><p>Biting her lip, Sam watched the flames close in on Lara who slowly straightened herself. Sam hoped she won’t slip on the weathered wood. Lara must have felt the heat by now. Sam ran a nervous hand through her hair. “Lara,” she urged her again.</p><p>Lara jumped off the statue towards the closeby chandelier. Sam gasped, watching Lara fly high through the air. Lara grabbed the large metal ring, making it swing back and forth from her momentum. Its chains creaked, the ceiling cracked, debris and dust fell down.</p><p>Sam’s light followed the suspicious sounds coming from above Lara. Though, the light was hardly necessary. Crackling flames engulfing all of Vishnu lit up half the room. Smoke rose to the ceiling. The statue’s wood creaked under the heat.</p><p>Ignoring that, Sam and Lara looked at where the chandelier’s chains connected with the ceiling. Another crunch. More dirt trickled down and into Lara’s upturned face. She coughed again and spat.</p><p>Sam rushed forward. She didn’t know how to catch Lara without getting hit by the chandelier should both of them come down but she would try anyway.</p><p>Lara hurried hand over hand along the metal ring to the other side, turned to face the next one between the pillar and the entrance, and swung forth and back. As she built up momentum again, the chandelier swung with her. The chains clattered and creaked. Cracks spread out in the ceiling.</p><p>“Light!” Lara shouted right before she released the chandelier and soared through the air like a trapezist.</p><p>Panicking, Sam took just nearly too long to point her flashlight at where Lara was headed. Lara skillfully grabbed the next chandelier, elegantly swung back and forth a few times and came to a halt.</p><p>Sam released a breath of relief.</p><p>Then, a loud crack from above. The chains on the side of the chandelier that Lara hung on to broke loose. Lara dropped.</p><p>Sam cried out in panic. She shuffled around, trying to place herself so that she could catch Lara. Considering the height she dropped from, the best Sam could probably do was act as a crash mat.</p><p>But Lara didn’t fall. The remaining chains held. The side of the chandelier Lara held onto dropped with her, swung around, and Lara crashed into the wall several meters above the entrance. She grunted with the impact.</p><p>“Are you okay?” Sam called out before noise from behind caught her attention. The burning, wooden statue broke and dropped to the floor and a fiery explosion. A wooden carving and another statue caught fire.</p><p>“I’m fine,” Lara groaned.</p><p>Sam pointed the light back at the ceiling. Lara had turned around, planted her feet on the wall behind her and pushed herself off. She swung towards the pillar but couldn’t reach it yet. She came back towards the wall, pushed herself off once more and then kicked against the pillar. It rumbled. More cracks formed in the ceiling. Chunks of stone fell down and crashed onto the floor behind Sam. She jumped away, yelping.</p><p>Lara kicked the pillar again. It moved but not enough. The first chandelier Lara had hung on came down. It crashed into a stone statue, shattering it, landed on its side on the floor, caught chunks of Vishnu’s burning wood, and rolled across the hall as a hoop of fire.</p><p>Lara swung towards the pillar and kicked with both her feet against it. Grating and rumbling, the top crept along the ceiling. Lara dangled in the air while observing the pillar. Then, as the chandelier she held onto swung towards the pillar again, it came loose. Lara left hold of it and crashed into the pillar while the chandelier and part of the ceiling came down.</p><p>Sam jumped and ran away as rocks dropped down around her. She wanted to get to safety but where was it safe now? She stopped for a second, observing the situation. Left and right, fire spread along the walls. The ceiling came down bit by bit. The ground shook under the pillar. The only thing she could do was leave the hall — and Lara. Sam threw a glance at her. Lara held onto the pillar close to its top as it toppled over. It looked safe enough for her standards so Sam ran out of the entrance and then turned around to watch.</p><p>The pillar fell forward. It was too wide for Lara to keep holding onto it. She slid down and when the pillar passed the 45-degree mark she slipped down its side and under it. It crashed into the floor with deafening noise. The ground quaked. Large dust clouds swirled up.</p><p>Sam darted forward in shock, fear growing that her partner had just been crushed under tons of stone. She ran and stumbled over the shaking, shattered floor and debris along the lying pillar. Among the rumbling that echoed through the hall, she heard coughing somewhere in the dust. She dropped to her knees in the dirt.</p><p>Lara lay there, her face in the crook of her arm. She was scratched up, a few drops of blood running down her dirty skin, but other than that she seemed well.</p><p>The relief Sam felt let tears run down her cheeks. Sam wrapped her arms around Lara to hug her and then helped her up.</p><p>Lara, after she’d made sure Sam was unharmed, inspected the pillar. The upper end had landed right on the small area of floor in front of the exit. The dull rumbling in the room had ebbed down.</p><p>“See?” she said, making a sweeping motion with her arm along the bridge she’d created. She looked proud of herself.</p><p>“Dude,” Sam said, making a sweeping motion with her arm motioning towards the destroyed hall.</p><p>A hint of embarrassment rushed over Lara’s face. “Well, there are still some undamaged pieces.” And with that, she climbed onto the pillar and crossed it to the other side.</p><p>“Unbelievable,” Sam muttered before following her.</p><p>They were halfway across when the rumbling began again. The pillar shook. Lara waited for Sam to catch up and took her hand. Together, they hurried to the exit.</p><p>The rumbling had gotten so loud, Sam and Lara put their hands over their ears once they were on the other side. The noise seemed to come from everywhere. Cracks formed along the walls above the chasm they’d just crossed. The ceiling above it split and came crashed down.</p><p>Sam and Lara ducked through the exit into safety but Sam peeked through the door, watching as the chasm extended. The mountain shook and boomed as the last part of the fissure broke away. The hall slid down — first slowly, then it crumbled, fell apart, and rolled down the slope as debris among boulders of mountain rock.</p><p>When the dust clouds had cleared away, Sam peered out again of what used to be the exit of a somewhat long room. Now, instead of looking into the dark interior of a temple hall, she let her eyes wander over the top of the Cambodian rainforest as the sun stood low and red over the horizon. All that was left of the temple halls they’d traversed was a swath of destruction through the vegetation down the mountain and an echo in the valley.</p><p>Sam sighed heavily. “Your plans suck.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>A text for a prompt over at the S.S. Endurance Crew discord server.<br/>Thanks a lot to Computerbutch for betaing.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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